Booking Your Train Tickets With Omio – A Review

Making travel plans can sometimes be a bit of a hassle. I often find myself trying to compare different airfares and prices for bus and train tickets as well as the best routes – all this, going back and forth between multiple tabs. So how do you find the best prices and routes when travelling in Europe?

Omio is a nifty travel search engine and booking app that takes this hassle away. It’s one of the best travel apps when it comes to planning your travels.

You can book flights, trains and buses with over 80,000 destinations across 12 European countries. This not only includes popular cities and airports, but also small towns and villages that are served by trains and coaches.

But the best thing about it is that it will give you information about what the cheapest and also the fastest options are.

My favourite mode of transport has always been train travel, so if it’s possible, practical and I have the time, I try and travel by train whenever I can.

There is something romantic about train travel, cruising through a country at high speed while you relax byreading, or listening to music or even by simply watching the world go by out of the window.

So with a trip from London to Wales coming up, I decided to put Omio to the test!

How Omio works

Starting your search is pretty simple. Enter the departure and destination points, date/s and number of people travelling, and hit ‘Search’. If you happen to have a discount rail card for any European countries, you can add the details here, before hitting ‘Search’.

You will get results for flights, train and coach tickets, with times, prices and route details, highlighting the fastest and the cheapest options. It also gives you details of the rail and coach companies and airlines.

As my preferred option was travelling by train, I dug a bit deeper. At the bottom of the screen I selected my departure time and the train ticket I wanted.

The next screen gave me options for selecting the seating class, and different types of ticket with information about exchange and cancellation terms.

At this stage you can also bring up the route details from the top right corner.

If you are happy with the options given and this is the ticket for you, then you are ready to go ahead and book. It really is that simple.

After a very straightforward booking of a popular route, I also wanted to test a lesser known one. I needed to travel from Cardiff to Newtown in Mid Wales, and booking my ticket turned out to be really easy too.

From the different options given I picked train travel again, as not only is it my preferred one, it was also the cheapest and fastest.

This journey involved a change in another town, and the full route details were listed on the app, including how long I would need between trains – 7 minutes in this case, so I really kept my fingers crossed for no delays!

After the booking I received an email with the booking confirmation, the journey details and also instructions on where to collect my train ticket – in the UK you have to get your ticket printed at a collection point machine at the railway station – together with an invoice.

For other options like coach and plane tickets the process is just the same so, all in all, Omio is pretty easy to use.

What I loved about Omio

• First of all, the interface is super user friendly, and it’s really easy to find the information that you need, even for first-time users.
• I really liked that it tells you which are the cheapest fares and the fastest routes, so all that juggling different tabs is completely unnecessary.
• Another really good point is that you can change the currency in which the prices are displayed very easily.
• It takes Amex for payments so I can collect Avios points, which will eventually translate, into free travel.

What would make it even better

• At the moment, Omio covers 12 countries, which is great. However, there are still a lot of European countries that are not currently available, so it would be great to see that list grow.
• As I mentioned, you can change the currencies but there are only 9 currencies available at the moment. It would also be great to have more currencies to reach a bigger audience, as the more people use an app, the better it becomes.
• It would also be nice to have the option to pay by Paypal, although this is not a deal breaker for me, as I like using my Amex to collect Avios points.

Conclusion

Overall, if you are travelling in any of the available countries – UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Poland, Belgium, Austria and Czech Republic – then Omio is the ideal app for your travel planning, making research easy and a lot quicker.

Omio can save you hours of trodding the internet looking for the best travel options.

You can download the Omio app from iTunes and from GooglePlay.

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Disclosure: This post has been created in collaboration with Omio. As always, all views are my own.